


Instead of a View

by Yahtzee



Category: Hannibal Lecter Tetralogy - Thomas Harris
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-12-23
Updated: 2005-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-25 04:40:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1632065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yahtzee/pseuds/Yahtzee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dr. Lecter has always found it very easy to walk in the world without being seen for what he truly is.   (Set between "Silence of the Lambs" and "Hannibal.")</p>
            </blockquote>





	Instead of a View

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Cobaltnine

 

 

 

 

In London in late November, it is cold enough to wear mittens. Dr. Lecter finds this convenient, as the sixth finger on his left hand is the one identifying mark that's most difficult to disguise. He could and perhaps should have the finger removed; the medical procedure would be routine, and there are plenty of doctors who will not ask inconvenient questions -- even doctors who read the tabloids, who know that a sixth finger is the mark of Hannibal the Cannibal. Money is the crudest form of silencing morality, but it is an effective one, as Dr. Lecter has reason to know.

Yet he will never amputate that finger. It is a part of him, and it is fully agile and strong. And Dr. Lecter has always found it very easy to walk in the world without being seen for what he truly is.

The hotel is a small, unprepossessing place, located in a part of London where men go to meet one another. Currently the neighborhood is undertaking the Sisyphean climb of gentrification, rising from trash to respectability along with the practices conducted there. For now it remains an area where an older man in a trenchcoat and hat can wander around for a while in the twilight, as though he were uneasy about entering a bar he wished to enter, or waiting for someone to usher him into a hotel like this one.

The person Dr. Lecter sought left the hotel 12 minutes ago. He watched her go from half a block away, the bustling with luggage, the quick duck into a rental car. She wore a shapeless black coat and pantsuit that do nothing for her; her hair is shorter now, almost mannish. Lecter disapproves. However, he noted with a certain satisfaction that her shoes have caught up to her bag: crocodile.

He pays well for his hints about what Interpol is and is not doing, whom they do and do not seek. Yet it is all worth it, in this moment when he has just watched the Interpol agents working with a visiting American law-enforcement officer, who has come to them all the way from the FBI.

As the rental car drove by him (four passengers, the three others men in stiff suits, all of them wearing opaque sunglasses despite the darkening sky), Lecter looked down at his feet. Although he would like to see her face, his desire is a tightly controlled thing, not likely to lead him to risk her glimpsing his face in return.

That will come later, and he is willing to wait years.

They've checked out at an odd hour -- other investigations, other calls from local constabularies, other demands upon the all-important agents. This sort of unpredictable schedule is customary for people in their line of work.

It is not customary for the hotel cleaning staff. They will not have sent a maid to the vacated rooms yet; most likely they will not send anyone until tomorrow morning. That gives Dr. Lecter the time he needs to accomplish his task.

He walks easily through the small lobby as though he belongs there and gives the portly man behind the desk a quick nod. In return he receives a small smile. Nobody who works at a hotel remembers all the guests.

(Fat tissue is a rich golden hue, evocative of saffron, and it ripples beautifully. Lecter briefly imagines slashing through the chubby desk clerk's red vest and white shirt and ruddy skin, all the way through to that cloud of saffron. He could arrange it becomingly on the desk -- the billows would not be unlike the voluminous hydrangeas clustered in nearby vases -- to greet the next guests to check in. Neatening up afterward would be as simple as rinsing off his trenchcoat and licking his fingers. This is only a daydream, though; indulging here and now would reveal his identity as surely as that sixth finger, making tiny excited circles now within the scratchy wool of his mitten.)

The lights were just switched off in three rooms on the second floor. Dr. Lecter takes the stairs; most guests, even those on the second floor, will prefer the elevator, and so he is likely to go unnoticed. The early evening is a good time for his exploration. Hotels are least active then, with guests already checked in, settled, and by and large out for the night. Nobody sees him as he walks along the hallway, paying attention to the rooms on the south hall.

A television sings an inane theme song behind the door of room 202; Lecter walks past it. 203 is quiet.

Slowly Dr. Lecter removes the mitten from his right hand and takes from his pocket a skeleton key. Unlike the makeshift paper-clip and ballpoint-pen devices he was forced to work with during his incarceration, this is a well-made device, efficient and professional. Dr. Lecter's warm tongue smoothes along his cool gums as he works with the door's lock, imagining the progress of his tongue against the ridges of his teeth as the motion of the key within the tumblers, rolling over and over.

 _Click._ The door opens. Is this the room he seeks?

A single inhalation and he knows that it is. Dr. Lecter smiles and shuts the door behind him. He has a place to stay for the night.

For a few years after their collaboration in the matter of Buffalo Bill, she did not wear L'Air du Temps. Perhaps it disconcerted her that he had detected the scent upon her skin; perhaps, in the manner of women, she had simply moved on to the new. But L'Air du Temps is still thick in the room, so much so that Dr. Lecter can taste its bitterness upon his tongue. She's gone back to it at last.

Does it no longer remind her of him? Perhaps.

His shadowy form is reflected on the dead TV screen as he paces once through the room, breathing in deeply. Deodorant, hair spray, nail polish remover: all so acrid to the olfactory glands. But mingled in are other, better scents.

Dr. Lecter walks to the en suite, where the air is still moist with steam. Here he can smell Evian skin crme and what is likely the hotel's own soap. She showered just before leaving; the cheap white plastic curtain is still beaded with water. A stroke of his thumb against the plastic reveals that the water has had time to turn cold. Wet spots on the terry bathmat reveal the impressions of her feet, the place where she stood naked not an hour before. She could have seen herself in the long mirror across the hall; he stares at the mirror for a long while, seeing not his present reflection but her vanished one.

Slowly he strips, removing every piece of his clothing and folding it efficiently upon the towel rods. (With the temporary slovenliness of hotel guests, she has left her own towels in moist heaps upon the floor. In her home, he suspects, she's far tidier.) Dr. Lecter undresses the way Houdini did before performing escapes; it is a way of removing artifice, yet also a performance meant for a witness.

At last he stands nude, each of his feet on the damp spots her feet left behind. He breathes in deeper and faster, deeper and faster again, making himself dizzy and saturating his nose and lungs with the air she breathed. His body responds to her lingering presence, but like a gentleman, Dr. Lecter reserves his pleasure for his beloved's bed.

Lecter walks to the bed, where the tacky coverlet is half-knocked from the mattress and where the sheets are still rumpled. It does not require much imagination to look down at the swirls of cotton, the indentation on the down pillow, and see the outline of a body, evidence of a hastily grabbed afternoon nap. She worked late last night, poor thing; they work her so very hard, and she grinds away at every task they set. She deserves better than that. She deserves luxury, rest, satisfaction. He will give her that, someday. Soon.

To judge from the shapes in the sheets, she sleeps on her back.

Dr. Lecter lifts the covers and lays his naked body upon the bed, face down, one arm on either side of the pillow. The firmness of the mattress presses against him, presses back, the springs creating the illusion of real movement and reciprocity. When he inhales now, the perfume he drinks in is purely her.

Against the pillow's cotton cheek, Dr. Lecter whispers, "Clarice."

On the pillow curls one short auburn hair. The dark red tip of his tongue darts out to touch it.

END

 

 

 


End file.
